


Pretty Words (Speak To Me Of Vienna)

by mazzyg



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Bittersweet, Complicated Relationships, F/M, Hetalia Kink Meme, Human & Country Names Used, Language Kink, Post-World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-14
Updated: 2016-07-14
Packaged: 2018-07-24 00:32:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7486230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mazzyg/pseuds/mazzyg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>De-Anon from the Hetalia Kink-Meme.</p><p>Post-War Occupation means learning how to survive, even with the worst of company. It means learning how to escape, even when you're trapped. Roderica and Ludwig are bound together whether they like it or not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pretty Words (Speak To Me Of Vienna)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Hetalia Kink-Meme ages ago. Half a decade? Unfortunately I've lost the original prompt, but it was something along the lines of Female Austria and Germany and Languages. I think. War basically sucks and being a defeated country sucks too. This may be the first Lady Austria and Sir Germany fic on AO3? Well then.

Ludwig left kisses on her stomach, warm and soft, his fingers tugging down the edge of her skirts. Roddi gasped into her palm, eyes shut and mouth pressed against her own skin to satisfy a deeper urge. His mouth, god damn that German mouth. She whored herself out so easily, married into a dozen beds over the centuries, but there was something else about the slow way Ludwig conducted himself that kept her coming back. Outside, the rain fell in harsh patterns against the window panes. Drafts cut through the drapes and dragged at her bare shoulders, the building too old and money too thin to fix them. 

It was all the fault of the man who slipped her skirts down over her knees, but she couldn’t stop wanting his hands and his mouth. 

“Speak to me of Vienna,” Ludwig murmured into her hip, his fingers sliding around the backs of her knees. “Tell me, Roddi.”

The smooth, rounded vowels of Viennese filled her mouth, the thicker taste of old German mixing with modern Austrian making the words hold a note of foreign song to Ludwig’s Deutscheland-trained ears. 

“Vienna’s the jewel of Austria. Her towers are my towers, her songs my songs,” Roddi breathed, shifting her hand to watch over the hills of her breasts Ludwig’s head dip to kiss the inside of her knees, grip steady on her calves. “Her streets run into dead ends and narrow alleys, but she is the best. The best. Her cafes always serve fragrant coffee, and her pastries are always just the right amount of sw-sweet.”

Ludwig’s teeth grazed her thigh, a spark of pain mixing with the lazy, melting pleasure in her stomach. 

“Sweet, so sweet,” Roddi breathed, clutching at the bed sheets. “Apfelstrudel, gugelhupf, sachertorte with just the right amount of a-apricots.”

His fingers slipped past slickness, brushing against sensitive heat. Bed sheets crinkled as the wide shadow of him blocked out what little street light escaped through the shut curtains. On this street, the green gas lamps had not yet been upgraded to electric, so the glow threw an ethereal cast that left everything ghostly. Roddi gasped, biting her wrist, as his mouth skirted her left breast and bit. 

“Dobostorte,” she exhaled into her skin, eyes shutting as her body shook and twisted despite herself around the slow stroking of Ludwig’s hand, keeping her vowels extended and dragging, lazy like their sex. “Chocolate and butter cream, melting in your mouth.” 

She knew Ludwig understood barely half of what she said, let alone paid any attention, but she kept on. “Coating the inside of your teeth, soft and m-m-oist.”

His weight straddled her thighs, his teeth on her throat. There was always pain with Ludwig, but measured out in careful spoonfuls. Her hips arched up into the slip of his fingers, hooking into her warm depths, shaking as her hands fell uselessly to the bed. “And a piano forte, playing in the background. You can hear it in the streets, trickling among the throngs, slow classics winding with the smell of coffee.”

Her voice cracked as suddenly it was not fingers, but a hot, sharp thrust that locked the two of them together. Ludwig grunted, his breath warm against her cheek. Obligingly, she wove her arms about his neck and into the ruined mess of his hair that she’d torn apart only an hour ago after they’d stumbled through the door, escaping the cold press of a German winter and the searching eyes of America, England, and France chasing them through every hallway and into every corner. 

They moved, her Viennese poetry stumbling on her tongue with the powerful feeling of Ludwig’s body moving in her own. Overwhelming, taking away her thought, and all her memory. Desperate, she clawed at his back, leaving satisfying long scores against his war-torn skin. 

“P-pianos, and sometimes–ah–violins, small girls with thin h-hands, or boys with, with their hair tied back,” she murmured into his ear, hooking her knees over his hips to goad him faster. “Music, Mozart and Beethoven, Brahms. Wiener Classic, Wagner and–and–“

They cried out, Roddi caught on the names of famous composers, Ludwig some begging wordless phrase, and Roddi was filled with a different heat as her body clenched and Ludwig’s shuddered. The silence filled only with rain and their gasping, Ludwig’s hand on her thigh promising to leave a distinct palm-shaped bruise. Roddi could feel the heat of blood under her fingernails. 

Roddi’s body unlocked, limp as her limbs fell back to the sheets, staring but not seeing the cracked ceiling of the safehouse above their heads. 

“Weanerisch,” she breathed.

“Don’t talk,” Ludwig replied in thick high German, a growl caught in his throat. He drew from her, catching his weight heavily on his elbow over the pale sculpture of her hungry body scarred with the memory of gun fire. “No more of it.”

His words spoken into her throat almost begged, for all the snarl; Roddi laughed, the sound thin like the covers. Her voice snapped at him in his own clipped dialect. “Then don’t ask me to seduce you with Viennese just so you can pretend that you aren’t in Berlin. You’re naive. You’ve always been naive.”

Ludwig said nothing, pushing away from her to sit up at the edge of the bed. Roddi studied his back, still broad, but now bleeding. She diffidently touched the edge of a four-fingered scratch, and he did not wince from it. 

“Do you only like the sound when they are pretty words, Luddi? Pretty, pretty words, like what your Boss told you in his poor Austrian, like what Prussia told you in his old German, like what Italy told you in his sweet–“

“Shut up,” Ludwig said, his voice tired, his bare shoulders held tight. 

It held none of the sting of the Reich, but Roddi closed her mouth with the memory of lightning blue eyes and the snap of bone underneath the butt of his gun. Cold air made her feel bare, and she reached for her skirts and shirt to drag them to her in fistfuls. Ludwig dragged his fingers over his neck, her teeth marks a growing rosy chain down his shoulder. 

“Please, Roderica.”

“Austria,” she snapped at him, pulling her shirt on over her shoulders. Where was her bra, the infernal modern invention?

Ludwig’s back straightened, the sound of him stilled, and she busied herself patting about them for her glasses, lost at some point between the door and the bed. 

“I’ll escort you back to your quarters, then,” Ludwig replied, his voice taut. “You’ll not be able to find it in the rain alone.”

Failing to find her glasses, Roddi squinted at the opposite end of the plain flat bed, and collected her slip from underneath the wrinkled pile of her plaid skirt. “Don’t be ridiculous, they’re frightened about any sign of any of us coming back together. They’ll see it as a coup in progress, the paranoid fools.”

Ludwig didn’t reply while she located her bra, shoved behind the pillows they had pushed out of their way, and dug it out with bony fingers. All art had been lost in their shape, leanness from piano playing quickly turning to bony knobs out of hunger. 

He twisted to face her, and she found him holding out her glasses carefully in his left hand. She stared at them for a moment before she plucked them out of his hands and unfolded them with soft metal clicks. They froze her ears as she slipped them back onto her nose, and when she next looked up she saw Ludwig’s face thrown into a stark relief of drawn lines by his mouth and drawn brows, emotional state other than ‘weary’ unreadable. 

“You’ll get lost,” he told her stiffly, giving her quickly his back. So shy in the aftermath of sex. She had once considered it endearing. He quickly pulled his rough slacks back on from the floor, and she watched go through the easy motions, his back flexing and rear pleasing as she contorted her arms to redo her bra clasps at the small of her back. 

Her lips pressed thinly together. “Yes, well, I don’t need to be lead around like a myopic grandfather by a lame dog.”

Ludwig picked up his shirt gingerly in clumsy hands, holding it without looking at the mussed collar and a lost button. He gave it up for lost, pulling it on while she slipped off the bed and pulled her slip back on with a small, businesslike tug. 

They spoke not at all as they finished dressing. Ludwig waited by the door, and caught her elbow as Roddi prepared to storm past him into the hostel that never asked questions and would forget so easily for the right amount of American dollars. 

She looked up into his intent face, jerking at her elbow with a pointed glare. Ludwig did not let go, and after a few futile tugs, she gave in. 

“Fine.” She stepped away from him, busying herself with tying her scarf into a knot. “Fine. But we’re separating two streets away from the Americans.”

Ludwig, pushing open the door slowly and giving the hall a thorough warning look, nodded mutely. Still a soldier, she thought, watching him slide into the hall with the ingrained wariness of street dogs, and hold the door for her. 

She swept past, chin held high. 

Downstairs, they moved through the sparse common room without pause, their bribes already paid. Ludwig caught the eye of the sleepy man slowly turning the pages of a newspaper by the door, and there was a brief exchange of weighty glances before they were out into the rain. Thin and petering, it didn’t soak as much as slowly induce the flesh to freeze. Roddi found herself stepping close to Ludwig’s bulk, which blocked not only the breeze but much of the sideways inclinations of the rain, despite herself. She turned up the oft-mended collar of her coat, hiding her face against the cold instead of leaning into his arm.

Ludwig’s elbow brushed her arm, and she slipped her hand into the crook of it feeling like the loaned wife she had been for more than twenty years on German soil. The urge to take off her shoe and stab him in the eye with the heel overwhelmed her. 

She made their silence into a game, counting out the blocks where Ludwig said nothing, and she said nothing. Five, six; ten. Ludwig took the back roads and alleys she swore she’d never seen, and had not existed, until she set foot on them.

The lights of the occupation districts chilled the night with a clean white glow ahead of them, the loud, rowdy sound of American and British soldiers muted only by the greater howl of the weather. Roddi found her steps slowing, dragging on Ludwig’s elbow. The rain had the streets empty, and they were ghosts treading on dangerous territory.

Ludwig looked down at her, coming to a stop underneath the protective roof of a bus terminal with cracked plastic for walls. Water dragged his hair into his eyes, cutting small streams down his face. She made a noise at him, reaching up shove his blonde finge out of his eyes as she tried to blink through the collection of water on her glasses making everything bright, sliding smears. 

“You look like a drowned dog,” she informed him. 

His mouth thinned, and he bent his head to better be within her reach, even if his brows bent with confusion. Rain gathered on his great-coat in sparkling bunches, and she flicked her fingers at them to destroy them into merely wet smears. 

“Roderica,” Ludwig started, his German making clipped pieces out of her name. She went up on her toes, combing her fingers back through his hair to try to make it resemble his usual severe style. “Roderica.”

Roddi stepped back, severely eyeing the smeary glimmer of Ludwig. 

Ludwig stepped forward, gripping her upper arm. She stumbled as he pulled her in, locking up as the sharp memory of being shoved to the ground flickered through her mind. The hard hands of Germany gripping her, bending her, breaking her–

“Stay safe,” Ludwig said into her ear, and his thick voice warmed her in her stomach. She shivered, remembered the thick tone of his voice as his hands ran up her sides and undid her bra from behind. Rough, certain fingers, and a steady, harsh voice. 

Roddi grabbed at Ludwig’s arm to keep her balance, eyes wide in her face as she stared at him in turn. Ludwig’s cutting, bright blue eyes looked straight through her, then broke her grip without effort as he forged past her into the rain. Puddles soaked his coat as he drove through them, unheading of any obstacle as he strode for the electric lights. A dark, determined shape, despite all the attempts to break him.

She wrapped her coat more tightly around herself against the chill, and fussed with her hair. Counting the minutes, she waited until Ludwig dissipated from view and her toes had gone entirely numb before following him into the rain.

His German still warmed her ear, all the way back to the headquarters, past the jeering, and chased her all the way back to Vienna.


End file.
